Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb

Two desktop SEO crawlers, one built for raw data and one built for guided audits.

At a glance

Pricing

Screaming Frog keeps it simple. A paid licence is £199 a year, and the free version is the same tool capped at 500 URLs per crawl, which is enough to evaluate it honestly on a small site. Bulk discounts start at 5 licences (£189 each) and drop to £169 each at 20 or more. There is no monthly option, but £199 a year works out to about £17 a month, which is less than Sitebulb Pro costs.

Sitebulb sells two desktop plans plus cloud plans for teams. Lite is $17.50 a month billed monthly, or about $13.50 on annual billing, capped at 10,000 URLs per audit with a reduced hint set. Pro is $42 a month billed monthly, with roughly 15 percent off on annual billing, and raises the cap to 500,000 URLs per audit while unlocking the full set of 300+ hints, audit comparisons, scheduling, and customized PDF reports. Extra Pro users are £7 a month each, and the Cloud plans add automated recurring crawls with no project limits at team pricing. Both vendors adjust prices over time, so check the pricing pages linked below before you buy.

When to pick Screaming Frog

Pick Screaming Frog if you want maximum control over the crawl and the data. Custom extraction, granular configuration, bulk exports, and the ability to crawl very large sites limited only by your hardware make it the stronger tool for people who already know what they are looking for. When I need to pull a specific pattern out of half a million URLs, this is the tool I open.

It is also the cheaper option over a year of steady use. One flat licence covers unlimited crawls with no per-audit ceiling, and the integrations with Search Console, Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights let you join crawl data with performance data in one place. Scheduled crawls and command line operation make it the easier tool to automate.

The tradeoff is that it hands you data, not conclusions. If you cannot already tell which of 40 warnings actually matters for this site, the export will not tell you.

When to pick Sitebulb

Pick Sitebulb if the output you need is a defensible audit rather than a dataset. Its hints rank issues by importance and explain why each one matters, which shortens the distance between crawl finished and recommendations written. For consultants who deliver audits to clients, the customized PDF reports and audit scores on Pro do a lot of the packaging work.

The audit comparison feature is quietly useful too. Being able to show a client that the March audit had 214 issues and the June audit has 90 is a better retention argument than any dashboard I have built by hand. Crawl maps also help when you need to explain site structure to someone who does not think in spreadsheets.

If you are earlier in your technical SEO career, Sitebulb doubles as training. Each hint links to an explanation of the issue, so you learn the why while you fix the what.

What most comparisons miss

The two crawlers disagree less than the marketing suggests. Both render JavaScript, both integrate with Google data, and both will find the same broken links. The real difference is who does the interpretation: you, or the tool. That means the right question is not which crawler is better but how much guidance your workflow needs.

Hints are opinions, and opinions create work. Some portion of Sitebulb's flagged issues will not matter for your specific site, and triaging them takes time. Experienced SEOs sometimes find the guidance layer slower than just reading the raw data.

Also, plenty of professionals simply run both. At £199 a year and roughly $500 a year respectively, the combined cost is small next to the fee for a single serious audit. Screaming Frog does the extraction, Sitebulb produces the deliverable.